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” BAST COAST-WEST COAST WAL. / verbal, it was useful for its mar- keting possibilities. But it may also have played into a real, not hyped, desire for vengeance on Knight's part, since he is said to have blamed Puffy for a close friend's murder. The feud moved to a new plane at a Christmas bash in 1995, hosted by Death Row at the Chateau Le Blanc mansion, in the Hollywood Hills. A record promoter from New York, Mark Anthony Bell, who is an associate of Puffy Combs, is said to have been lured upstairs to a room where Knight, Tupac, and their entourage had been drinking. Bell was allegedly tied to a chair, interrogated about the killing of Suge's friend, and hounded for the address of Puffy and Puffy’s mother. He is alleged to have been beaten with broken champagne bottles, and Knight is said to have urinated into a jar and told Bell to drink trom it. Bell received an estimated six- hundred-thousand-dollar settle- ment from Death Row, and he declined to press charges. Bur a friend of Bell’s told me that he had reached him in Ja- maica about a month after the incident, and Bell had said to him, “I’m here till I heal. They busted me up bad!” People who were with Tupac the last year of his life are not surprised that he would be in- volved in something like this. “When Tupac was with Suge,” one friend says, “Suge would get him all stirred up, and he'd try to behave like a gangster.” He recalled another incident, in the spring of 1996, when a producer said that he wanted to leave Death Row with Dr. Dre. “He came out all bloodied up,” Tupac's friend said. “And Tupac was a part of that. He had to show Suge what he was made of.” “4 UPAC always wanted to be a leader, not a follower,” Preston Holmes, the president of Def Pictures, who had worked with Tupac in the movies “Juice” and “Gridlock’d,” says. “And in order to be on top in that world, he had to act a certain way—screwing the most women, stomping the most guys, talk- ing the most shit. But I had conver- sations with him in this period, when he would say, ‘Gangsta rap is dead.’ | think he was trying to extricate himself.” In February, Tupac had decided to start his own production company, called Euphanasia, and he asked his old friend Yaasmyn Fula to come to L.A. to run it. Fula began trying to organize Tupac’s business affairs. “We weren't getting copies of the financial accountings,” she said. “We'd ask for them, and they'd send a present” —like a car. “I felt like there was this dark cloud over us. I knew so much was wrong—but Pac would say, ‘Yas, you can’t keep telling me things, I know what I am doing.’” Fula felt that Afeni, from whom she was becoming es- tranged, had been influenced by Knight's attentions and largesse. Tupac's signing with Death Row had transformed the lives of his extended family, even more than his contract with Interscope had. “They had lived lives of scarcity, worry- ing about the next meal, worrying about how to pay the rent,” Fula says, but now they stayed at the elegant Westwood Marquis hotel for several months, rack- ing up an “astronomical” bill. “Pac felt he was cursed with this dysfunctional fam- ily,” Fula says, “although he loved them. And as his success grew, especially in the last year, this presence grew. They were always there.” Afeni Shakur says that “Death Row in the beginning treated us much better your Sunglasses, girls- the woods are crawling with phelographers! than Interscope had.” But she suggests that she was not oblivious of the dark side of Knight and Death Row. She told me that Tupac had not allowed either Syke or Tupac’s young cousins—the Outlawz, who travelled with him and whom he supported (and one of whom, Yafeu Fula, Yaasmyn’s son, was shot and killed two months after Tupac's mur- der)—to sign with Death Row, because he “didn’t want any of them to live in bondage.” She also told me that when Tupac encouraged her to go out socially with Knight's mother, she believed that he was doing that in order to protect her. “Suge's mother was very nice,” Afeni said, “but I never gave her my phone number. We both understood it was the rules of war.” The document that Kenner had drafted and Tupac had signed in prison stipulated not only that he would be- come an artist for Death Row but also that Knight would become his manager and Kenner his lawyer. For Kenner, Death Row’s lawyer, also to represent Tupac was at best bad judgment and at worst a clear case of conflict of interest’: And if Kenner possessed an ownership interest in Death Row as well, somé-« thing which has long been rumored in - Los Angeles music-industry circles but - ry ae